Hi all,
Our living room is the typical sort of thing you find nowadays in a victorian terrace - two rooms knocked through into one. We have the original boards stripped and varnished with a few rugs around. It looks nice (to my simple tastes), but being on the ground floor with plentiful ventilation underneath it's all outrageously wasteful in winter, with lots of heat vanishing in drafts blasting up from between the gaps. The obvious solution is to put fitted carpets in. But I'm wondering a few things.
Is the ventilation underneath the floor so important when there is no floor covering on top? The air circulating around in the room will ventilate the underfloor void through the gaps (in much the same way that the freezing air under the floor is currently ventilating the living room through the same gaps!). So could I block up the vents?
If this logic is flawed, I'm tempted to get onto my back in the wriggle space under the floor with some of the outrageously cheap fibre glass insulation currently available and to pin it to the underside of the joists, but to leave the vents open so a gale could still howl beneath the insulation. Would the permeability of the insulation be able to provide enough ventilation to the underside of the floor without there being major drafts?